the good book

You Are My Bible

You, with no middle name and no father,
the virgin birth with no star hovering above
for infidels, kings or martyrs like me to follow
and so I canvased the night after night skies
for a sign of you, my opposite gender Jesus,
searched in vain for eight and thirty years,
like a bewildered Bedouin left wandering a desert mirage,
like a wounded animal left howling beneath a druid moon,
taste of lonesome death upon lips so long without
the water turned to wine, the body turned to bread
of Love's communion, of Love's consecrating kiss,
an apostle abandoned by hope, orphaned by faith
until at last saved from myself by your grace,
a spiritual leper freed to shed the rest of his skin
and release a chrysalis soul from a cocooned heart,
resurrection like butterflies escaped from a cage of ribs
reincarnated as doves roosting in the peace of your pages
where I read your revelations, sang your psalms, prayed your prayers,
turned epistle into epiphany, divined aphorism from apostasy,
this James The Lesser found no longer bound by King James
and a version of apocalypse sown from the seeds of despair,
an apocryphal, self-fulfilling prophecy swept to the four winds
by you, the word made flesh, my salvation, for you are my bible.

from A to Zzzzz's

Sleep All Summer

I may never be a better man than I am here tonight
with my head full of wasps and plans to sleep all summer
so I can dream of your love raining down, beautiful and cool,
to relieve the sting of another June through August without you.

unreeling

At The Drive-In : Day For Night

in the abandoned drive-in theater of my former life,

the sun slung low and sinking fast behind

the torn-screen flicker and stop-start glitch

of scenes jump cutting across broken sprockets

and a series of seemingly unrelated edits

begun at dusk winding down toward a new dawn

where even day for night could not quite hide

the nervous breakdown behind a marriage unreeling

photo by weburbanist

the acorn of a poem planted

Upon Recalling An Evening With Stanley Kunitz And His Wife

At dinner,
twenty- some years ago,
in a Manhattan eatery
with the poet Stanley Kunitz
and his strange and lovely wife,

You look like a Native American,
where is your family from?

She asked, taking my hand in hers.

Earlier that evening,
after shooting part of a documentary
on her famous husband in their small walk-up,
Mr. Kunitz offered me a tall tumbler of straight vodka
and his glass in an emblematic toast to the moment.
With one eye over the lip of my own, looking for a cue
to the etiquette of a ritual he had engaged in with all manner
of famous men and women in this humble kitchen galley way,
decade after decade upon the very floorboards beneath my feet,
I followed the great old poet's lead and continued tipping
glass to lip, the white light bare bulb burning overhead,
the white hot distilled spirits burning my throat,
singeing sinus cavities on their way to where
poetry lies in ephemeral pools of inspiration
waiting for release even all these years on.

North Dakota.

I replied, her other hand atop mine now,
Mrs. Kunitz' gypsy eyes locked in a trance
with my own, dull brown and drunk punched.

I knew it Stanley, I knew it. We are dining with an Indian.

Stanley, distracted by the sudden appearance of the waiter,
offered a half-nod before motioning for a round of drinks
with a wave of his weather-veined, liver-spotted hand.

Vodka, straight-up, all the way around.

Mrs. Kunitz squeezing my hand,

Tell me all about North Dakota, dear.

The night devolving into a fog of family histories
and anecdotes from a Nobel Prize winning poet
and his mistress-cum-Mrs.-cum-muse whose hand's
slightness I can still recall sitting here years later
reading The Testing Tree, 'native-blood' stirred by

Once I owned the key
to an umbrageous trail
thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
gave me right of passage
as I followed in the steps
of straight-backed Massasoit
soundlessly heel-and-toe
practicing my Indian walk.*

*excerpt from Stanley Kunitz' poem The Testing Tree

un segreto della famiglia

The Lost Art Of Listening

You never knew I was there.

the wind rattling a flagpole

I always hated the holidays.

each one of us in a different room

It never got any easier.

indifference passing as family

You never knew I was there.

yet we all heard the wind

one and one is three

And So A Son Or So A Daughter

and so a son or so a daughter from somewhere unseen,
from just behind a stoic stand of budding beechwood trees,
from just beneath a setting sun's rippled reflection sinking

out of sight,
never out of mind,
beyond imagination

from somewhere when we first met,
hiding in the fog of our two shadows touching

from somewhere in our struggles,
waiting patiently for two to first become one

and so soon this one and one will at last become three
and so a son or so a daughter from somewhere unseen

it's only 'rock' and 'roll' but i like it

Seven Easters On

The rock, rolled away and revealing
a kind of crypt at the end of a path
of self-inflicted self-destruction.

My dusty footprints barely there now
and leading away from all we sacrificed
to be together seven Easters on.

photo: 'the empty tomb' by rich legg

undertow

Waves Of Mutilation (There Is No Sunken Treasure)

There is no sunken treasure
beneath your bottomless ocean.

There is no X-marks-the-spot
upon the incomplete map of your heart.

Here
in your sea's cruel depths,
unrepentent and unrelenting,
I have suffered a thousand slow deaths
adrift upon your unfathomable latitudes,
leaving me delirious below a cannibal sun
blistering, ravaging the very flesh of my soul,
sucking the carnal knowledge from my loins
as I swallow saltwater in a delusional effort
to hold on another day, another year, another decade,
desperate not to succumb to your unforgiving undertow
and its suction pulling me under again and again
only to spit me to the surface where I survive
by the sheer force of a will treading waves of mutilation.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Gospel Oak

There is a field beyond these woods
hiding all manner of the unseen
within its folds, within its thicket,
within its hutches and burrowed holes.
Without a sound I have made a secret life
in these surroundings, quietly, patiently
building a new way of being,
silently constructing a shelter
against the wind and rain of sad memories.
Mineral rich waters from years of ice
around this heart melting, flowing
underfoot and through my veins,
baptizing me, birthing me anew,
born again within a rural religion
fashioned from perseverance
and practiced like a craftsman,
meticulously carving a gospel of oak
from a lone shade tree planted 100 years ago,
delicately weaving the fabric of my being
from the thistle, heather and wild grasses waiting
in the hushed chapel of this field beyond these woods.

like a prayer

All The Tired Horses

measured in my movements

each motion like a prayer

bow

bend

crouch

taking days to drop to my knees

before your temple at last

inhaling the long, slow breath of you

and in this moment of grace

a betrayal, a denial undone

fire frozen in an arc around a martyr

four horsemen rest and water their horses

In Memory Of John Updike (1932-2009)

Epitaphs In Granite

Run rabbit run, Updike is dead,

His unwritten pages on a pyre

Turned to ash, turned to smoke,

Turned to layers of earth left untilled,
Turned to grey fog not unlike a ghost
Lifting over a New England field of green

Where rabbits run between headstones
In the fading, failing of twilight falling
Across our final lines, our epitaphs in granite.

incandescence

Nightlight

rummaging, foraging,
the dark for your light

incandescence unrivaled

glowing brightly beneath
these sheets, your skin

the imagined art of me

Lament Of A Post-Impressionist

I am no good at drinking anymore
and all the punch-drunk nights I tally from memory
bring a grin but nothing more than rum-soaked regrets
flagging a ride on a lonely road in the middle of a town
full of weekend revelers and beer-drowned dreams.

I want to see the sun and its star slung savage light,
not some Monet-Manet impression of what lies ahead,
overhead the blue beyond blue of sky belies comprehension
of wasted nights and Sundays spent in the arms of lethargy,
for the thrill is gone if ever it was the imagined art of me.

man's best friend

Dog Day Afternoon

My dog you lie sleeping,
more content than I will ever be.
My god, you know nothing of
days, weeks, birthdays, weddings, death, divorce.

Your disappointment lasts just a moment.
Forgetting you didn't get to ride in the car,
not even wondering where I went, greeting me
with the same electric enthusiasm whether I am
arriving home from a clock's slow crawl across eight hours work
or from the minutes it ticks while taking out the trash,
all the same to you it seems to me in a dog day afternoon.

If only I could forget so easily,
the slights, the slanders, the longing left waiting
in a memory eager to retrieve,
no matter how far I have flung
the sticks and stones that broke my bones,
their names and faces fetched,
etched in a brain forever reacting to a bell
sounding, ringing with the sting of resentment.

My god, to be you my dog,
knowing tomorrow is not even a conception you conceive of,
that yesterday leaves no mark and today happiness is assured
in a walk through fallow fields where yesterday, today, tomorrow's
memories are carried away by a wind and your fleeting sense
of their scent soon forgotten, sparing you again and again
the collective scar-tissue that marks your master's skin.

walk with me today

The Last Jaguar

Roaming
vast stretches,
a continent.

On a collision course with indifference
where one becomes none.

Walk with me today though,
steps behind,
stalking.

Your ghost
as menacing,
as misunderstood
as when you roamed the high and low,
never knowing your own pale stalkers
were never more than one step behind.

photo by emil mccain

idly dreaming

In This Gentle Hour

In this gentle hour I am alone
though somehow your love pervades,
sheltering me from melancholy and wind gust
whipping folds of mercury, flaps of grey flannel
across the lake, painting windows framed by walls
where inside, safe and sound, I sit quietly listening
to my mother's voice through an answering machine
which somehow manages to mask her advancing age
and the burden of my father's dementia not easliy forgotten
here in this gentle hour where I await with calm idle your return
while we are still young and idly dreaming of growing old together.

young lust, naive love

From A Poison Well

right there in our little yard,
asleep for years but slowly stirring
awake beneath a flowerbed of bleeding hearts,
the water of blessed union running red and backwards,
vows flowing in reverse turning virgin white to scarlet letter rust,
young lust, naive love withering along with grass where we once lay
before the beginning of the end began its leaching from a poison well

an ocean empties

Lovers On Our Backs (In A Salton Sea)

when you surrender,

tender

beneath the weight of me,

waiting patiently

for the wash, the roar, the hum,

somewhere an ocean empties

completely,

only to fill again

with the sweat and moist

of collapse,

in waves upon a beach, upon a bed,

leaving you and me,

lovers on our backs,

emptied out, asleep and adrift

in a Salton Sea.

painting: pablo picasso's 'the embrace', 1903

empathy

You Know Me Better Than I Know Myself

You know me better than I know myself,
My tics, my fears, my less affected moments.

You hum me like some warm and reassuring tune
I don't always recognize from the opening notes.

And even though I have spent years inside this skin,
You know its bruise and blush better than I ever will.

You wear me like some torn tee-shirt I won't give up,
Well aware of the soft, the sweat, the stain, the security.

But beware my love for I am not always who you think,
To know me is to not always love me, but somehow you do,

For you know me better than I know myself,
For better, for worse and, for all I know, for myself.

your name, unknown for now

A Perfect Circle

Your name, unknown for now, still rising on thermals
Where red-tail hawks and golden eagles wing to soar
Before settling to Earth and home from Heaven on high
Where God's Three Graces with great humility whisper it

In a psalm, in a prayer, in a round
Creating
A perfect circle from its own sound

Gilding a halo to behold, to hover in air over your head,
Here below in a mother's heart, in a father's thought,
Gliding down to crown a love sublime, a conception conceived
In your name, unknown for now, to complete a perfect circle

photo: halos and arcs /complete parhelic circle by eva seidenfaden